Failing the Test of Fairness: Institutional Racism and the SAT

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted August 12, 2002.

Ever noticed how expensive restaurants go out of their way to fill the air of their bathrooms with the refreshing scents of a pine forest after a gentle rain? Hoping to cover up the smells that would otherwise predominate, the keepers of luxury lavatories bombard their patrons with diversionary scents, presumably to make one’s overall dining experience more pleasant.

Frankly, I’ve always perceived such efforts as more than a little inadequate to the task at hand. Shit, after all, even on a pinecone, is still shit. Likewise, there’s a good reason why the makers of incense don’t market a patchouli and crap stick. As we say in the south, you can pretty up a pig by slapping a dress on it, but in the end, it’s still a pig.

Such is a lesson we would do well to remember in the wake of the recent announcement that the Educational Testing Service is going to "revamp" the SAT, ostensibly to make it more fair and relevant for a 21st century educational system.

Despite their insistence that the new SAT will better predict student ability while reducing unfairness by eliminating culture-bound items like analogies, the announced changes actually overlook the largest problems with standardized tests.

Although eliminating analogies is an admirable first step since studies have found these to be biased against those from non-white, non-middle-class backgrounds, (what with questions involving words like "regatta") the problems with the SAT were always deeper than that. In fact, whatever cultural bias the ETS has eliminated with the ban on analogies will likely be re-triggered with the addition of a "writing" section, whose graders no doubt will emphasize stylistically and grammatically Standard English, marking students down whose writing style employs idioms, phrases, or merely word patterns more common to communities of color. Poetic license will have no place, one suspects, on the SAT writing test.

Though internal cultural bias is a real phenomenon, and one that has been observed in testing for many years, the bigger issue is that supporters of the SAT presuppose that administering a standardized test to profoundly unstandardized students from unstandardized schools, and then using results on that test to determine college placement can ever be fair.

The fact is, even if such biased items are removed from the SAT, the unequal educational experience of the students taking the test -- especially in terms of class and race -- all but guarantees a persistent scoring gap between whites on the one hand, and blacks, American Indians or Latinos on the other.

Furthermore, the announcement that Algebra II will be added to the test can only cause alarm for those concerned about the racial score gaps; after all, tracking in schools is so pernicious that blacks, even when they score at the top of 8th grade achievement test distributions, are about 40 percent less likely than whites whose scores are merely average to be placed in upper-level math courses in high school. As such, they won’t even get around to Algebra II by the time the SAT is taken.

But indeed, even tracking isn’t the biggest issue here. Oh sure, it matters. On the one hand it means that certain students of color will be underexposed to the kind of material found on a test like the SAT; and on the other hand it means that certain students --especially whites and many Asians who are presumed to be "good at math" early on, and thus tracked accordingly -- will have an edge going in to the test. But still, tracking is not the clincher that makes the SAT inherently problematic.

The two biggest issues are of a different nature altogether and incapable of being fixed with piecemeal reforms.

The first is what Claude Steele, Chair of the Psychology department at Stanford University has called "stereotype threat."

As Steele and his colleagues have noted in a number of ingenious experiments, black students take standardized tests under a cloud of group suspicion that hinders performance -- suspicion on the part of the larger society that they are less intelligent and capable than others.

Black students are well aware of the negative stereotypes held about them by members of the larger society. As such, when blacks who are highly motivated and value educational achievement take a standardized test and expect the results to be used to indicate cognitive ability, the fear of living down to the stereotype negatively impacts their performance. These students may rush through the test -- so as to seem more confident than they truly are -- or alternately take too much time, trying desperately not to make mistakes. The self-doubt engendered by the racist beliefs of the larger culture is added to the general anxiety that all test-takers feel, to produce, for black students, a unique disadvantage.

As proof that it is stereotype threat and not inherent ability differences that explain racial gaps on standardized admissions tests, Steele notes that when the same test questions are given to whites and blacks in experimental settings, and the students are told that the results are not indicative of ability and will not be graded, the stereotype threat dissipates and they perform as well as their white counterparts.

In other words, so long as racist beliefs about black ability are common, those stigmatized by these beliefs will often underperform as a function of the anxiety generated by the stereotype itself. Certainly there is nothing that ETS can do to the structure of the test that can alleviate this problem.

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